1. Field of the invention
The invention concerns a method and a system for processing logic programs in parallel - especially in Prolog-like languages - using at least one processor, which allows parallelism - also retroactively - by an existing process, called "father", creating at least one process, called "son", standing in a parallel relationship to the father.
2. Description of the prior art
The state of the art in parallel processing logic programs--especially in Prolog-like languages--is the retroactive conversion of a sequential computation into an OR-parallel one by copying the common bindings to the new process after undoing all bindings made by the old process after the split OR-node. In this way conflicting bindings by alternative OR-parallel branches to common variables can be performed, since each process has a private copy of the memory space needed for representing the variable bindings. Disadvantages of this method are the time and space needed for copying and the time needed for undoing the bindings. Often the split-off OR-parallel process fails after a few steps and thus most of the work during its creation is wasted.
Further terms and expressions are defined later at the beginning of the detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention.